Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24323813-20140310033154/@comment-1399757-20140311224442

'Is that really the only aspiration of athiests? I think that everyone can make their own aspiration, that doesn't come from religion - religion is just something that promotes and forwards that idea of transcending beyond our boundaries.'

I'm not saying it's the only aspiration of "atheists" per se - but that it is the only aspiration of atheism itself - the whole rally point being around "god does not exist". Atheism is not punctuated of its own with moral law, prophecy, or wisdom. People can possess such qualities aside from it, but it is not an inherent director towards those ends or a justifier of them. The qualities of the philosophy "as is" effectively present the same problems as anarchy. You can trust a man to treat his fellow man like himself easy enough, but everyone has a very different view on how one's self should be treated. To consider atheism of itself a replacement of religion therefore bears a lot of potentially dangerous consequences in the long run without solid moral supplementation. As any historian can attest, that's not a combination that's capable of remaining consistent or pure indefinitely - hence its lack of continuity outside of devotional political movements.

Also I don't think its necessarily wrong to deny this First Cause stuff, considering you could just keep looping back and ask what created God or how did God come about.

That's a paradoxical assertion (aha *knee-slap*), but it touches on the very subject that God and religion solve. The whole point is in acknowledging that there is a singular point from which all things were created - it is effectively and perhaps the only valid application of the ontological principle "so perfect it must be true". It is logically impossible, for instance, for an infinitesimal cycle or group of contingent entities to be responsible for holding themselves and all other contingencies in existence: you need a starting entity to establish that cycle and entities before that one in order to start that cycle - hence none of those cycles can be of themselves the true "source" of life: ie. there is always something else behind it. Introduce a singular, simple, yet perfect and self-sustaining force into the equation however and that problem is not only taken care of but satisfactory and not consistent with every validated scientific theory known to man. By the time you start getting into the science of alternative dimensions, dark matter, worm holes, black holes, and all other matters of spacial science one is suddenly faced with the reality that "reality" is not so day-to-day humdrum or "1 + 1" as we make it out to be. Heck, we exist within a vacuum. What is it and where did it come from? No idea really - we're only beginning to touch the surface of that one. Logic as we know it continually expands beyond our grasp and capabilities as we go further along, so to what point does it become evident to the reflective mind that there is no such thing as a first cause, an entity that always was and always will be, but that there are trillions upon trillions of (perhaps infinitesimal) alternate scenarios of our lives playing out in other realities at this very moment? My point is that our knowledge of "the beyond" is not as clear-cut as we like to think, and as such we have room for propositions that otherwise would look odd at face value. As such, and given there is simply no other plausible explanation known to us to account for the problems that would inherently arise otherwise, there is no reason not to believe in a "self-evident" first cause, and nothing else to rationally believe in in the first place, for there is no other consistent theory that can make sense of contingent continuity's existence/origin.